Shaking up our expectations

Shohei Imamura's Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, which
screens this Friday at the Dryden Theatre, is, at least at its foundation,
remarkably similar to his critically acclaimed film The Eel. Both movies deal with a middle-aged, white-collar office
drone who leaves a big city life to take up with a bunch of rural kooks (and
both characters are played by the great Koji Yakusho, who is probably best
known in this country as the star of Shall
We Dance?). But where The Eel was
shockingly violent (at least at the beginning), Bridge shakes us up with several surprising sex scenes.

The whole
city-to-country thing is probably meant to be a commentary on the conflict
between modern Japan and that country's traditional beliefs, but since my
knowledge of Japanese history is limited to the three minutes we devoted to the
island nation in high school, most of it was probably lost on me.

In Bridge, the main character is Yosuke
Sasano, a recently laid-off businessman who wanders the streets looking for
work while his nagging wife interrupts his job hunt by ringing his cell phone
and squawking about the mounting bills back home.

During his
journey, Yosuke befriends a dying homeless man (Kazuo Kitamura) who tells him a
story about a valuable golden Buddha statue he stole decades ago, stashing it
in the home of a former girlfriend out in the sticks. With the prospect of
finding work growing dimmer and dimmer, Yosuke heads out to said sticks in
hopes of finding both the house (he was told it was near a red bridge) and its
hidden treasure. But, in true cinematic fashion, he finds so much more.

I've witnessed
many odd things happen in a small-town setting (thank you, David Lynch), but
what Yosuke sees really takes the cake. He stops at a supermarket, notices a
cute girl shoplifting and is surprised to see her leave behind both a puddle of
water and a fish-shaped earring. Curious, Yosuke grabs the earring and
carefully follows the girl home, only to find out she lives in the house by the
red bridge. After meeting Saeko (Misa Shimizu), the two characters engage in an
impromptu round of sex, during which we learn the origin of the "warm water"
(and we're just as surprised as Yosuke, too).

But there's
more than just the "venting" sex --- most notably the colorful locals who
somehow manage never to be clichéd (including an African
marathoner-in-training, who is often chased by dogs, the angry words of the
locals, and, sometimes, a bicycle-riding, bat-wielding coach --- he can't speak
English, either, which is mighty Jarmuschian).

The locals
warn Yosuke that his virility is being sapped by his new squeeze. Like fellow
Asian import Suzhou River, the water
here is just as important as any character, and there's even the very Vertigoish double-identity thing, since
Yosuke looks just like Saeko's old boyfriend who drowned while he was fishing.
Meanwhile, Yosuke takes a job as a fisherman (a la Yakusho's character's return
to his blue-collar roots in The Eel
--- he became a barber).

Some folks
might think Bridge is an extremely
sexist film, especially when Yosuke graciously offers to have lots and lots of
sex with Saeko if it will help to cure her shoplifting. It's actually very
pro-feminism, but I can't explain how without going into parts of the plot that
I think should probably not be revealed in too much detail. Yakusho, as always,
is wonderful as the long-faced sad sack (he's Kiyoshi Kurosawa's star of
choice, as well) and his chemistry with Shimizu is very believable --- they've
appeared opposite each other in The Eel,
Dance? and Imamura's previous
American release, Dr. Akagi.

The
76-year-old director, who has won three awards at Cannes, adds plenty of his
lingering static shots, while demonstrating his uncanny ability to change the
mood from extreme drama to slapsticky comedy at the drop of a hat.

Read My Lips starts out like a French version of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men. Its main
character is Carla (Emmanuelle Devos), a partially deaf secretary for a
property development company who is both mocked and exploited by her
co-workers. Carla has trained many of her current bosses and continually finds
herself working her tail off on various projects, only to be removed just
before they're completed.

Her
personal life isn't much better, as her friends don't think twice about
dropping their kids off at Carla's apartment so they can party it up.
Basically, she's a 35-year-old doormat, and everyone is wearing big muddy
boots.

The mousy
Carla, whose life seems to be firmly rooted in daily routine, finds things at
work turned a bit upside-down when she is told she can hire an assistant for
herself. She asks the employment agency for a "well-groomed man" with nice
hands, and gets someone with bad prison tattoos who looks like Lemmy from
Motorhead. His name is Paul (Vincent Cassel) and he's just done a stretch for
aggravated robbery, but after an awkward interview, Carla hires him anyway
(She: "Have you worked with spreadsheets?" He: "Spreadsheets? Oh, yeah. Mostly
German ones.")

Sparks
don't exactly fly between the two officemates, which makes us even more
suspicious when Carla bends over backwards to make Paul's life a whole lot
better. When she discovers the office has been doubling as his living space,
Carla hooks Paul up with a spacious apartment owned by the company, and even
gives him an advance on his salary. Is he taking advantage of her lack of
personal contact with other humans, or is she just eager to keep him employed
so she can have someone to boss around?

The answer
is neither, as it turns out. Lips
shifts from a gawky office romance into a pot-boiling thriller in its second
half. After he is badly beaten by a mobster (to whom he owes 70,000 francs) and
forced to tend bar at his popular nightclub, Paul cooks up an idea to abscond
with a large sum of the man's money. His plan involves having Carla perch on a
roof with a pair of binoculars and read the lips of the people in the mobster's
apartment. Meanwhile, Carla takes advantage of Paul's street smarts in ways
that positively affect her career. It's reciprocal exploitation by a pair of
society's rejects.

Logistically,
Lips is a nightmare, beginning with
the whole lip-reading thing (why does everyone in that apartment stand by the
window when they talk?). The lack of chemistry between the two leads undermines
the film's few romantic moments, and a subplot involving Paul's parole officer
is less than half-cooked. But most glaring of all is the transition between Lips' two very different halves. It
almost seems like writer-director Jacques Audiard (he wrote Venus Beauty Institute) simply threw a
switch and hoped for the best.

Luckily,
Devos's performance is strong enough to make the aforementioned criticisms seem
far less important. She won the César, France's version of the Oscars (beating Under the Sand's Charlotte Rampling, The Piano Teacher's Isabelle Huppert,
and the heavily favored Audrey Tautou from Amèlie),
and rightfully so, as Devos wears Carla like a second skin. Lips also deservingly won a César for
its sound, which is presented from Carla's perspective. We experience sound the
way she does, so when her hearing aid is removed, we hear fumbling before
everything becomes muted and muffled.

Never once
predictable, Lips seems like the kind
of project some Hollywood star will remake in the near future, though it's
unlikely they would allow themselves to appear as damaged as either of these
two characters (a la Tom Cruise and Vanilla
Sky, right down to the big rooftop ending).

Interested in raw, unedited movie ramblings from Jon? Visit
his site, Planet Sick-Boy www.sick-boy.com, or listen to him on WBER's Friday
Morning Show.